The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

You know, things are so crazy lately around the world, that everything going off the rails has become the new normal. I mean, look at the Senate's health care bill! It's just one space alien short of To Serve Man! (Except of course women are among its prime victims.) I feel like there must be some newer, more novel catastrophe that needs to occur to really shake us out of our stupor...

...what's that? ... What if an important, populous country, with a rich history that spans the cultures of east and west, decided to stop teaching evolution to all of its students? Well, yes, that'd certainly qualify as a novel and really tragic catastrophe. ... Hmmm? ... oh I see. You're saying this has in fact happened...

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Here is a mild example of what happens when religious service providers, like child care facilities, aren't subject to the same rules as everyone else. A 4-year-old girl at the Zion Lutheran Learning Center was hog-tied by her caretakers. Sarah Fenske at the Riverfront Times in St. Louis reports:

The little girl had been running around when she was supposed to be napping, and so Mr. Josh had bound her legs together with duct tape. She would be untied, another teacher told her, once she behaved.

A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all. The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the government’s benevolence. Instead, our reliance must be on the substantial safeguards of free and open discussion in a democratic society.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Darwin Martinez Torres, 22, of Sterling, Virginia is charged with the murder of 17-year-old Nabra Hassanen. Torres allegedly confronted Nabra and a group of her friends outside an IHOP, all of whom fled to a mosque except for Nabra whose body was found yesterday afternoon.

In London, a man plows into a group of Muslims leaving a mosque, killing one and injuring 10 others. When the driver tried to escape on foot, he was tackled by another man who reports that the driver said, "I want to kill more people, I want to kill more Muslims."

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

They got him. Lyle Jeffs of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and brother of incarcerated leader (and child rapist) Warren Jeffs, has been found and arrested in South Dakota. He escaped custody last year as he faced conspiracy charges for money laundering.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

The Southern Baptist Convention, after being shamed into it, votes to condemn white nationalism and the alt-right. (Before you get too excited, they also voted to condemn Planned Parenthood and to commend "those leaders who choose not to meet privately with members of the opposite sex who are not their spouse," meaning Pence.)

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

I'm quite proud of this new episode of Point of Inquiry, my second as the new host, where I talk to The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert about how we might honestly come to grips with inevitable climate change. She was super cool and really informative. PLUS, there's a bonus "exit interview" with now-former POI producer Nora Hurley.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Laurie Goodstein at NYT has a big feature on the religious left: newly galvanized by opposition to Trump, but tied to a party that is largely secular. Sojourners founder Rev. Jim Wallis tells her:

The fact that one party has strategically used and abused religion, while the other has had a habitually allergic and negative response to religion per se, puts our side in a more difficult position in regard to political influence. ... Most progressive religious leaders I talk to, almost all of them, feel dissed by the left. The left is really controlled by a lot of secular fundamentalists.